- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
For years, conservative billionaires have treated Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas to opulent vacations and trips on their private jets. If these were anything other than disinterested gifts, then they’re taxable — and Thomas owes the IRS a huge bill.
When Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas flouted longstanding ethics laws by refusing to disclose billionaire gifts, he avoided public outrage for years. Based on new revelations about the potential motivations behind those gifts, he also may have avoided laws requiring Americans to pay taxes on such donations, legal experts say.
Recent reporting from ProPublica revealed that Thomas was showered with luxury gifts from wealthy benefactors, including vacations, private flights, school tuition, and even a loan for a high-end RV. Though Thomas has insisted the gifts were just the innocent generosity of friends, many came after he threatened to resign over the justices’ low salaries — and one of Thomas’s vacation companions said the money was given to supplement the justice’s “limited salary.”
According to experts, if these benefits were given to Thomas as a way to buttress his regular pay and keep him on the court, they could be considered a taxable transaction rather than a gift. By refusing to publicly disclose such transactions, Thomas made it impossible for watchdog groups to alert tax-enforcement officials about the potential issue in real time.
Our elected officials and their appointments are all greedy, opportunistic bastards, a reflection of the people they govern. Garbage in, garbage out.
Our people would have to abandon their delusions of living materially superior lifestyles to other Americans if we wanted to have politicians and judges appointed by politicians that even entertain the notion of their offices being public service and not just another all American profit grift as they are treated today.
Our nation and increasingly the world under our capitalist’s pressure live solely by “what’s in it for MEEEEEE?”
In what fucking universe could anyone credibly think that a culture, society, or civilization dominated by the core value of
rational self-interestinsatiable greed could ever yield selfless public servants?The concept of private property, not to be confused with personal property, is dooming us all, and we’re all so indoctrinated into the zero sum mindset of “other people have to lose for me to feel like a big winnah” that I don’t see any hope without a painful collapse to remind us all of the human suffering we inflict on swaths of people, like our homeless populations, with complete apathy under this garbage culture and economy.
Clarance Thomas, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, etc are all symptoms of the greed disease that’s killing us. If they all dissappeared tomorrow, there’d be 2 greedy assholes each the next day vying to take their places and take up their grift. Our practiced core values would have to change for that to change.
They won’t change though, so carry on with the ironic outrage about this greedy opportunist doing what we’re all encouraged to do from Kindergarten through Colleges of Economics: doing what he can get away with to get his, and fuck everyone else 🇺🇸